I Automated My Client's Event Marketing - Invites, Reminders, Waitlists, All of It

Full transcript

Okay, so this is my client Zoe, and she's a coach who runs in-person workshops once a month for her clients and prospects to attend. Now, these workshops are capped at 10 people, and she only charges $10 for the workshop. It's not really the workshop she's selling. It's really the invite into the community, and from there she uses that as a funnel. But as it's not a direct revenue-generating machine, it's more of a lead-generating machine, we wanted to see what parts of this we could automate, to make sure she didn't have to spend too much effort trying to promote it, get it sold out and manage the invites and everything.

So what we set up is where she can plan out one year's worth of workshops in one go, and she can have it all there inside her Airtable base. Then when she has that, we have a system that does all the marketing and follow-up for her.

The way it works is every single day at, let's say, 9am, I can't remember what time we actually set it up for, it could be 9am, but every single day it checks: right, when is the next workshop date, and how many days away is that? If it's 14 days away, people get the invite. If it's seven days away, it says, right, we now have X amount of slots left. If it's one day away, it's, right, here's all the details for tomorrow. Then on the day, they get the reminder. The day after, all the photos from the actual event get sent out to the attendees. And then four days later, the follow-ups go out to the first-timers, to basically re-offer them into her sales call process.

Now, the same emails do not go out to everybody, and that's the important part. Everybody gets the right version of the email depending on where they are. So if somebody is a new lead, and they have not attended a workshop and they're not a past client, they're going to get an email something like: hey, we have seven slots left, this is exactly what we're doing, here's all the details, click the button and you can go book your slot. If you're a past client, it's: hey, you might actually be interested in this, thought of you for that. It's slightly different wording, and the way it's presented to the person is different. And then if they're a past attendee, the way it's presented to them is different again, because we'd re-offer them: hey, I know you were at this one, we have this one coming up this month, want to attend as well? Here's a link to book your slot if you want to.

Now, it's actually important to show this part here where it's highlighted. This is what's auto-populating from her plan that she originally did, where she can see the 12 months of workshops in a row.

So then when it comes to the booking numbers, we only do 10 per class. In the facility she's in at the moment it's at 10, and she sells them out. Now, if she moves to a different facility, it could be changed. But the way it works is every class has 10 slots allocated to it. Then she uses Calendly for the booking. So every time somebody books one, we have an automation that runs in the background, finds out what class they're booking for, and takes that slot away. So we have nine left, then so on. Every time someone books one, it takes it away.

And then from there we're able to see, if someone booked in, were they a past client, were they a past attendee, what were they, and we can attribute the tagging to them. So in our lead management board we have all of these contacts, and we know who's a past client, who's an attendee, who's a lead, and who's actually unsubscribed from it as well. So we're able to see all of these people inside one place.

Now, what happens if this sells out and we still have emails that are due to go out? Which happens sometimes if you're setting up a marketing campaign in ActiveCampaign or something: you'll sell out, and then it's, hey, just a reminder, people try to book and it's already gone. Well, the way this works is as soon as it's fully booked, instead of giving them the prompts to go book the class, it's going to say: look, we have this thing on tomorrow, it's on this day at this time, we're currently sold out, but we've opened up the waitlist here. If you put your name on the waitlist and somebody cancels, we'll send you out a notification. It's basically first come, first served. Whoever clicks the button first is going to get their spot. So the waitlist is done automatically.

Now, this sounds like a lot of effort, doesn't it? What do you actually have to do to keep this managed? All she has to do is, every time she has a workshop, create one row inside her table. That's basically the date, what the workshop is, what the name of it is, and what the key objectives of the workshop are. So, you're going to learn about this, this and this. And from there, the system will take care of everything else. It'll personalise all the emails, put them in place, and it's automatically on the timer. At the moment I think she has the 12 months planned ahead, but if she adds other locations and she wants to add in different emails and more information, it's super easy to add them from there.

So hopefully that made it clear what exactly is going on inside there. All the invites, the reminders, the follow-ups, the waitlist, the unsubscribes, it's all done automatically. Which previously, I know for myself anyway, any time there's an events list it's a big, big pain. So yeah, that's it all set up. If you have any questions about that, just contact me, you have the contact details below this video here. And if you want to have a chat about systems for your business, click the button below there somewhere and you'll be able to see everything that we do. And I'm sure there are more client projects somewhere next to this video as well.